Black House js-2

by Stephen King

  It is 11:20 A.M. He is getting hungry, too, since his breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee and a slice of toast smeared with marmalade, and that was three hours ago. Jack has the feeling that the afternoon is going to be a long one. He might as well have something to eat while he waits for the bikers.

  The back door of the Sand Bar opens onto a narrow rest-room alcove that leads into a long, rectangular space with a gleaming bar at one side and a row of substantial wooden booths on the other. Two big pool tables occupy the middle of the room, and a jukebox stands set back against the wall between them. At the front of the room, a big television screen hangs where it can be seen by everyone, suspended eight or nine feet above the clean wooden floor. The sound has been muted on a commercial that never quite identifies the purpose of its product. After the glare of the parking lot, the Bar seems pleasantly dark, and while Jack’s eyes adjust, the few low lamps appear to send out hazy beams of light.

  The bartender, whom Jack takes to be the famous Lester “Stinky Cheese” Moon, looks up once as Jack enters, then returns to the copy of the Herald folded open on the bar. When Jack takes a stool a few feet to his right, he looks up again. Stinky Cheese is not as awful as Jack had expected. He is wearing a clean shirt only a few shades whiter than his round, small-featured face and his shaven head. Moon has the unmistakable air, half professional and half resentful, of someone who has taken over the family business and suspects he could have done better elsewhere. Jack’s intuition tells him that this sense of weary frustration is the source of his nickname among the bikers, because it gives him the look of one who expects to encounter a nasty smell any minute now.

  “Can I get something to eat here?” Jack asks him.

  “It’s all listed on the board.” The bartender turns sideways and indicates a white board with movable letters that spell out the menu. Hamburger, cheeseburger, hot dog, bratwurst, kielbasa, sandwiches, french fries, onion rings. The man’s gesture is intended to make Jack feel unobservant, and it works.

  “Sorry, I didn’t see the sign.”

  The bartender shrugs.

  “Cheeseburger, medium, with fries, please.”

  “Lunch don’t start until eleven-thirty, which it says on the board. See?” Another half-mocking gesture toward the sign. “But Mom is setting up in back. I could give her the order now, and she’ll start in on it when she’s ready.”

  Jack thanks him, and the bartender glances up at the television screen and walks down to the end of the bar and disappears around a corner. A few seconds later, he returns, looks up at the screen, and asks Jack what he would like to drink.

  “Ginger ale,” Jack says.

  Watching the screen, Lester Moon squirts ginger ale from a nozzle into a beer glass and pushes the glass toward Jack. Then he slides his hand down the bar to pick up the remote control and says, “Hope you don’t mind, but I was watching this old movie. Pretty funny.” He punches a button on the remote, and from over his left shoulder Jack hears his mother’s voice say, Looks like Smoky’s coming in late today. I wish that little rascal would learn how to handle his liquor.

  Before he can turn sideways to face the screen, Lester Moon is asking him if he remembers Lily Cavanaugh.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I always liked her when I was a kid.”

  “Same here,” Jack says.

  As Jack had known instantly, the movie is The Terror of Deadwood Gulch, a 1950 comic Western in which the then-famous and still fondly remembered Bill Towns, a sort of poor man’s Bob Hope, played a cowardly gambler and cardsharp who arrives in the little Potemkin community of Deadwood Gulch, Arizona, and is soon mistaken for a notorious gunfighter. As the beautiful, quick-witted owner of a saloon called the Lazy 8, the lively center of village social life, Lily Cavanaugh is much appreciated by the crowd of cowpokes, loungers, ranchers, merchants, lawmen, and riffraff who fill her place every night. She makes her patrons check their revolvers at the door and mind their manners, which tend toward the opopanax. In the scene playing now, which is about half an hour into the movie, Lily is alone in her saloon, trying to get rid of a persistent bee.

  A bee for the Queen of the B’s, Jack thinks, and smiles.

  At the buzzing nuisance, Lily flaps a cleaning rag, a flyswatter, a mop, a broom, a gun belt. The bee eludes her every effort, zooming here and there, from the bar to a card table, to the top of a whiskey bottle, the tops of three other bottles all in a row, the lid of the upright piano, often waiting while its adversary comes sneaking up by subtle indirection, then taking off a second before the latest weapon slams down. It is a lovely little sequence that verges on slapstick, and when Jacky was six, six, six, or maybe seven, half hysterical with laughter at the sight of his competent mother failing repeatedly to vanquish this flying annoyance and suddenly curious as to how the movie guys had made the insect do all these things, his mother had explained that it was not a real bee but an enchanted one produced by the special-effects department.

  Lester Moon says, “I could never figure out how they got the bee to go where they wanted. Like, what did they do, train it?”

  “First they filmed her alone on the set,” Jack says, having concluded that, after all, Stinky Cheese is a pretty decent fellow with great taste in actresses. “Special effects put the bee in later. It isn’t a real bee, it’s a drawing—an animation. You really can’t tell, can you?”

  “No way. Are you sure? How do you know that, anyhow?”

  “I read it in a book somewhere,” Jack says, using his all-purpose response to such questions.

  Resplendent in fancy cardsharp getup, Bill Towns saunters through the Lazy 8’s swinging doors and leers at its proprietress without noticing that she is edging toward the bee now once again installed upon the shiny bar. He has romance in mind, and he swaggers when he walks.

  I see you came back for more, hotshot, Lily says. You must like the place.

  Baby, this is the sweetest joint west of the wide Missouri. Reminds me of the place where I beat Black Jack McGurk to the draw. Poor Black Jack. He never did know when to fold ’em.

  With a noise like the revving of a B-52, the enchanted bee, a creature of fiction inside the fiction, launches itself at Bill Towns’s slickly behatted head. The comedian’s face turns rubbery with comic terror. He waves his arms, he jigs, he screeches. The enchanted bee performs aeronautic stunts around the panicky pseudogunfighter. Towns’s splendid hat falls off; his hair disarranges itself. He edges toward a table and, with a final flurry of hand waving, dives under it and begs for help.

  Eye fixed on the ambling bee, Lily walks to the bar and picks up a glass and a folded newspaper. She approaches the table, watching the bee walking around in circles. She jumps forward and lowers the glass, trapping the bee. It flies up and bumps the bottom of the glass. Lily tilts the glass, slides the folded paper underneath it, and raises her hands, holding the newspaper against the top of the glass.

  The camera pulls back, and we see the cowardly gambler peeking out from under the table as Lily pushes the doors open and releases the bee.

  Behind him, Lester Moon says, “Cheeseburger’s ready, mister.”

  For the next half hour, Jack eats his burger and tries to lose himself in the movie. The burger is great, world-class, with that juicy taste you can get only from a greased-up griddle, and the fries are perfect, golden and crunchy on the outside, but his concentration keeps wandering from The Terror of Deadwood Gulch. The problem is not that he has seen the movie perhaps a dozen times; the problem is Tansy Freneau. Certain things she said trouble him. The more he thinks about them, the less he understands what is going on.

  According to Tansy, the crow—the raven—named Gorg came from a world alongside and outside the world we know. She had to be talking about the Territories. Using a phrase from Poe’s “The Raven,” she called this other world “Night’s Plutonian shore,” which was pretty good for someone like Tansy, but did not seem in any way applicable to the magical Territories. Gorg had told Tansy that
everything in his world was on fire, and not even the Blasted Lands met that description. Jack could remember the Blasted Lands and the odd train that had taken him and Rational Richard, then a sick, wasted Rational Richard, across that vast red desert. Strange creatures had lived there, alligator-men and birds with the faces of bearded monkeys, but it had certainly not been on fire. The Blasted Lands were the product of some past disaster, not the site of a present conflagration. What had Tansy said? A big, big place made all of fire . . . going way high up. What had she seen, to what landscape had Gorg opened her eyes? It sounded like a great burning tower, or a tall building consumed by fire. A burning tower, a burning building in a burning world—how could that world be the Territories?

  Jack has been in the Territories twice in the past forty-eight hours, and what he has seen has been beautiful. More than beautiful—cleansing. The deepest truth Jack knows about the Territories is that they contain a kind of sacred magic: the magic he saw in Judy Marshall. Because of that magic, the Territories can confer a wondrous blessing on human beings. The life of that extraordinary tough beloved woman making fun of Bill Towns on the big screen before him was saved by an object from the Territories. Because Jack had been in the Territories—and maybe because he had held the Talisman—almost every horse he bets on comes in first, every stock he buys triples in value, ever poker hand he holds takes the pot.

  So what world is Tansy talking about? And what’s all this stuff about Gorg coming here through a burning hole?

  When Jack flipped over yesterday, he had sensed something unhappy, something unhealthy, far off to the southwest, and he suspected that was where he would find the Fisherman’s Twinner. Kill the Fisherman, kill the Twinner; it didn’t matter which he did first, the other one would weaken. But . . .

  It still didn’t make sense. When you travel between worlds, you just flip—you don’t set a fire at the world’s edge and run through it into another one.

  A few minutes before twelve, the rumble of motorcycles drowns the voices on the screen. “Um, mister, you might want to take off,” says Moon. “That’s the—”

  “The Thunder Five,” Jack says. “I know.”

  “Okay. It’s just, they scare the shit out of some of my customers. But as long as you treat ’em right, they act okay.”

  “I know. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I mean, if you buy ’em a beer or something, they’ll think you’re all right.”

  Jack gets off his stool and faces the bartender. “Lester, there is no reason to be nervous. They’re coming here to meet me.”

  Lester blinks. For the first time, Jack notices that his eyebrows are thin, curved wisps, like those of a 1920s vamp. “I’d better start pourin’ a pitcher of Kingsland.” He grabs a pitcher from beneath the bar, sets it under the Kingsland Ale tap, and opens the valve. A thick stream of amber liquid rushes into the pitcher and turns to foam.

  The sound of the motorcycles builds to an uproar at the front of the building, then cuts off. Beezer St. Pierre bangs through the door, closely followed by Doc, Mouse, Sonny, and Kaiser Bill. They look like Vikings, and Jack is overjoyed to see them.

  “Stinky, turn that TV the fuck off,” Beezer roars. “And we didn’t come here to drink, so empty that pitcher into the drain. The way you pour, it’s all head anyhow. And when you’re done, get back in the kitchen with your momma. Our business with this man’s got nothin’ to do with you.”

  “Okay, Beezer,” Moon says in a shaky voice. “All I need is a second.”

  “Then that’s what you got,” Beezer says.

  Beezer and the others line up in front of the bar, some of them staring at Stinky Cheese, some, more kindly, at Jack. Mouse is still wearing his cornrows, and he has daubed some black antiglare substance beneath his eyes, like a football player. Kaiser Bill and Sonny have pulled their manes back into ponytails again. Ale and foam slide out of the pitcher and seep into the drain. “Okay, guys,” Moon says. His footsteps retreat along the back of the bar. A door closes.

  The members of the Thunder Five separate and spread out in front of Jack. Most of them have crossed their arms on their chests, and muscles bulge.

  Jack pushes his plate to the back of the bar, stands up, and says, “Before last night, had any of you guys ever heard of George Potter?”

  From his perch on the edge of the pool table nearest to the front door, Jack faces Beezer and Doc, who lean forward on their bar stools. Kaiser Bill, one finger against his lips and his head bowed, stands beside Beezer. Mouse lies stretched out on the second pool table, propping his head up with one hand. Banging his fists together and scowling, Sonny is pacing back and forth between the bar and the jukebox.

  “You sure he didn’t say ‘Bleak House,’ like the Dickens novel?” Mouse says.

  “I’m sure,” says Jack, reminding himself that he should not be surprised every time one of these guys demonstrates that he went to college. “It was ‘Black House.’ ”

  “Jeez, I almost think I . . .” Mouse shakes his head.

  “What was the builder’s name again?” asks Beezer.

  “Burnside. First name probably Charles, sometimes known as ‘Chummy.’ A long time ago, he changed it from something like ‘Beer Stein.’ ”

  “Beerstein? Bernstein?”

  “You got me,” Jack says.

  “And you think he’s the Fisherman.”

  Jack nods. Beezer is staring at him as if trying to see the back of his head.

  “How sure are you?”

  “Ninety-nine percent. He planted the Polaroids in Potter’s room.”

  “Damn.” Beezer pushes himself off his stool and walks around to the back of the bar. “I want to make sure nobody forgets the obvious.” He bends down and straightens up with a telephone book in one hand. “Know what I mean?” Beezer opens the directory on the bar, flips a few pages, flips back, and runs his thick finger down a column of names. “No Burnside. Too bad.”

  “Good idea, though,” Jack says. “This morning, I tried the same thing myself.”

  Sonny pauses on his return journey from the jukebox and jabs a finger at Jack. “How long ago was this damn house built?”

  “Nearly thirty years ago. During the seventies.”

  “Hell, we were all kids then, back in Illinois. How are we supposed to know about that house?”

  “You guys get around. I thought there was a pretty good chance you might have seen it. And the place is spooky. People tend to talk about houses like that.” They did in normal cases, at least, Jack thought. In normal cases, spooky houses got that way because they had been empty for a couple of years, or because something terrible had happened in them. In this case, he thought, the house itself was terrible, and the people who otherwise would have talked about it could barely remember seeing it. Judging by Dale’s response, Black House had vanished into its own nonexistent shadow.

  He says, “Think about this. Try to remember. In the years you’ve been living in French Landing, have you ever heard of a house that seemed to have a curse on it? Black House caused injuries to the people who built it. The workmen hated the place; they were afraid of it. They said you couldn’t see your shadow when you got near it. They were claiming it was haunted while they worked on it! Eventually, they all quit, and Burnside had to finish the job himself.”

  “It’s off by itself somewhere,” Doc says. “Obviously, this thing isn’t sitting around in plain view. It’s not in some development like Libertyville. You’re not going to find it on Robin Hood Lane.”

  “Right,” Jack says. “I should have mentioned that before. Potter told me it was built a little way off what he called ‘the road,’ in a kind of clearing. So it’s in the woods, Doc, you’re right. It’s isolated.”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Mouse says, swinging his legs over the side of the pool table and grunting himself upright.

  His eyes are screwed shut, and he claps one meaty hand on his forehead. “If I could only remember . . .” He lets out a howl of frustrati
on.

  “What?” Beezer’s voice is at twice its normal volume, and the word sounds like a paving stone hitting a cement sidewalk.

  “I know I saw that fucking place,” he says. “As soon as you started talking about it, I had this feeling it sounded kinda familiar. It kept hanging at the back of my mind, but it wouldn’t come out. When I tried to think about it—you know, make myself remember—I kept seeing these sparkly lights. When Jack said it was back in the woods, I knew what he was talking about. I had a clear picture of the place. Surrounded by all these sparkling lights.”

  “That doesn’t sound much like Black House,” Jack says.

  “Sure it does. The lights weren’t really there, I just saw them.” Mouse offers this observation as though it is completely rational.

  Sonny utters a bark of laughter, and Beezer shakes his head and says, “Shit.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jack says.

  Beezer looks at Jack, holds up one finger, and asks Mouse, “Are we talking about July, August, two years ago?”

  “Naturally,” Mouse says. “The summer of the Ultimate Acid.” He looks at Jack and smiles. “Two years ago, we got this amazing, amazing acid. Drop a tab, you’re in for five or six hours of the most unbelievable head games. Nobody ever had a bad experience with the stuff. It was all groove, know what I mean?”

  “I suppose I can guess,” Jack says.

  “You could even do your job behind it. For sure, you could drive, man. Get on your hog, go anywhere you could think of. Doing anything normal was a piece of cake. You weren’t fucked up, you were operating way beyond your max.”

  “Timothy Leary wasn’t all wrong,” Doc says.

  “God, that was great stuff,” Mouse says. “We did it until there was no more to do, and then the whole thing was over. The whole acid thing. If you couldn’t get that stuff, there was no point in taking anything else. I never knew where it came from.”